Criteria for Children's Literature: Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child as a Study Case

Year 2022, Volume: 4 Issue: 1, 55 - 71, 30.06.2022

Ghassan Al-mizragee

Abstract

Children's Literature comes to be one of the most famous kinds of literature in the recent period. It gives a chance to be in touch with the children's needs directly and affecting them properly by manipulating some constructive moral lessons which are the main pedagogical goals of this type. For example, the idea that the goodness will be rewarded and the bad deed will be punished runs deep in this kind of stories. Unquestionably, this type of literature has definite rules and criteria that are shaped to meet the goals behind writing such type of stories. In fact, there are three criteria that have been proposed by Nathenson and Escamilla in 2003 and there are also some additional criteria developed by Rebecca C. Obi, Ayanniyi Alhassan, and U. S. Osuji in 2010. This study is attempting to tackle these criteria by analyzing the structural framework and digging the pedagogical goals in Julia Donaldson's dramas: The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo's Child which are good examples of this kind of literature. The study starts firstly by giving an outlook to the definitions of this term (Children's Literature) then, explaining the criteria and finally examining the linguistic features and the structural framework of Donaldson's dramas to land on the most powerful points of usefulness to this kind of literature and how these dramas match the criteria.

Keywords

Children, Criteria, Julia Donaldson, The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo

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